ARTIST / Artist
ROSS BLECKNER
ROSS BLECKNER
Ross Bleckner (1949) opened his first exhibition in 1975 and saw a breakthrough in his career in the 1980s with his works on the AIDS crisis. Bleckner’s works are the products of his long-term research on universal concepts such as loss/death, memory, change/transformation. Bleckner stands out with his large-scale paintings no matter which series they belong into. In addition to his abstract works consisting of stripes and dots in the beginning of his career, he produced different works that had a symbolic and hypnotic effect in which birds, flowers or brains were depicted in the following years. Bleckner’s multicolored volumetric circles/cells layered on the canvas surface against a darker gray background correspond to blood droplets or molecules viewed under a microscope.
In the Flower series, Bleckner not only mourns the people lost during the AIDS crisis, but also ensures that those lost ones are remembered forever. Bleckner’s rise in the 80s was crowned when, at the age of 45, he opened a retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He became the youngest artist to hold a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum to date, taking his career to a broader arena. His works are placed in the world’s leading public collections, such as the MoMA, Whitney and Guggenheim museums, as well as the San Francisco Modern Art Museum, Martin Gropius Bau-Berlin, Reina Sofia-Madrid, Albertina Museum-Vienna, Kunstmuseum Luzern and Zentrum Paul Klee-Berlin. The artist, who has been represented by Mary Boone for a long period of his career, is now represented by Petzel Gallery in America.
